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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24133462">Making Another World</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda'>Glinda</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Leverage</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Community: monthlysupergo, Criminal Masterminds, Families of Choice, Found Family, Heist, Multi</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 17:08:12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,050</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24133462</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>It's knowing what's important: Parker, Hardison and Eliot figure out how to make the pieces fit afterwards.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>66</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Until the Darkness is Complete</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>For the prompt 'Darkness'</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The lights have gone out. </p><p>It’s not expected, but it’s within the parameters of possible responses to their actions, so Parker isn’t worried. Nonetheless, she pulls the knit cap from her inside jacket pocket and swiftly twirls her hair up inside it. For a thief like her, darkness is an old friend, so she keeps still while her eyes adjust, ensuring that it remains a loyal ally rather than delivering painful betrayal. </p><p>While she waits, Parker clicks her comm twice, a silent request for information. She hears Alec ‘hmm’ quietly in response, his tone warm and curious, clearly whatever has gone down is a challenge but not one that has him unduly worried. He mutters a few broken sentence fragments, but nothing that throws up any red flags to her. On Eliot’s end, she hears a muttered running commentary about lighting systems and security patrol patterns, mild irritation at worst, no indication of injury. </p><p>In the stillness, as her eyes adjust, Parker begins to see an edge of light where light shouldn’t be. It might just be a storage cupboard, or a secondary comms room, but it definitely wasn’t on the building’s blueprints. </p><p>Besides: </p><p>“If I were a cupboard, where there shouldn’t be a cupboard, why would I be glowing purple?”</p><p>“That’s a very distinctive color,” Eliot offers, tension rising in his voice. </p><p>“Only if I were hiding something highly dangerous that I wanted to disguise as something innocuous,” suggests Alec.</p><p>Things, it appears, are about to get really interesting.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Vision Strained, Seconds Change</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>For the prompt Seconds at monthlysupergo</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Alec waits. He’s both really good at it and absolutely terrible at it. </p><p>When it comes to both cooking and brewing he knows he drives Eliot up the wall with his impatience for it to just be done. But when it comes to the things that matter – for a system’s encryption to crack, for the perfect moment to spring a trap, for Parker – Alec’s really good at waiting. </p><p>This is one of the important ones, with the trap set and the explosives laid; now all he has to do is wait. </p><p>“Je suis disposé,” Parker says coquettishly in an intentionally terrible Canadian accent.</p><p>“It’s all good, man,” Eliot drawls, leaning into his accent the way he so rarely does, laying it on thick for the mark.</p><p>Alec counts backwards from thirty and takes his own cue.</p><p>Four Mississippi  </p><p>Three Mississippi</p><p>Two Mississippi</p><p>One Missi – </p><p>The explosion is exactly as loud as it should be, the destruction precisely calculated to have exactly as much impact as they need it to. Nonetheless, you can never be entirely sure exactly how a building will respond to that kind of stress - not even Parker can think of every outcome, and there’s only one set of breathing – laboured, but with exertion not pain – coming over the comms. The seconds of agreed radio silence stretch out seemingly forever.</p><p>In his head Alec starts counting the seconds again.</p><p>Forty Mississippi</p><p>Forty One Mississippi</p><p>Forty Two Mississippi</p><p>Forty three - </p><p>Parker’s whoop of triumph comes blazing out of Eliot’s comm, and Eliot starts muttering about crazy blondes and how he’ll be deaf for a week.</p><p>The wave of adrenaline hits Alec like an aftershock, and a relieved grin breaks across his face. He’s almost dizzy with it. They timed it right, they’re both ok: he can breathe again.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. A Familiar History</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>For the prompt 'trouble'</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>As a general rule, Eliot does not go looking for trouble </p><p>He was never one of those soldiers that revelled in the violence; who’d find any excuse to get into a fight, on or off the battlefield. Violence is something that he’s good at but it brings him no joy for it’s own sake.</p><p>Trouble though, has always had a way of finding him.  He’s always been surrounded violence, and he learned, a long time ago, that he couldn’t control or change that. He has only ever been able to control his response to it. To be the calm eye of the storm, and only respond proportionately and effectively. He carries a great deal of his own rage, so he owes it to those he cares about, to channel that productively, to not cause unintentional harm.</p><p>So as Eliot lies there on the floor looking at their young witness under the table, carefully leaving them a path of egress, he doesn’t think about how angry he is about what they’ve done or seen. They don’t need his rage, they need his calm, the stillness he’s worked so hard for so long to cultivate. He thinks instead of Parker with her stabbing and explosions, of Hardison who thinks a handful of years of stability in his childhood was ‘getting lucky’, about what their younger selves might have needed from him. </p><p>He let’s his smile go crooked and doesn’t hide the sadness that’s always there below the rage, and he says “Hello, trouble.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Even Moments We Never Share</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>For the prompt 'tomorrow'</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>If life has taught them anything; it’s that nothing this good lasts forever. </p>
<p>One more job, they say, maybe two. </p>
<p>Every time. </p>
<p>They walk away, time and again, but when the call comes they always come back. </p>
<p>They know it’ll hurt, but they do it all over again because when it works there’s nothing better. </p>
<p>With Eliot there’s an obvious physical toll, pushing himself further and further, knowing how badly it will hurt in the morning, to achieve victory for the team today. But they all do it, to a greater or lesser extent, sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally or psychologically. </p>
<p>They share meals and beers, hugs and secret handshakes, victory and defeat. Allow themselves to be talked into another drink, another hour, another game of pool. </p>
<p>(Just one more, maybe two.)</p>
<p>Tomorrow they’ll leave. Tomorrow it’ll hurt. Tomorrow normality will resume and the world will go back to it’s terrible self. </p>
<p>Still. </p>
<p>These days, there’s no Nate to tell them to scatter, or to gather them back together when it’s safe. The three of them are a team; a unit, they sink or swim together. </p>
<p>Maybe just this once, the tomorrow they all secretly fear will never come. </p>
<p>Perhaps, though, this is what tomorrow looks like, when you’ve built something real, something worth fighting for, worth dying for, worth living for. </p>
<p>When tomorrow isn’t something static, that might break with any wrong move, when instead it changes and grows together, maybe that’s when it morphs into something else: into forever.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Story title and chapter titles cribbed from the lyrics of Make Another World by Idlewild.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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